Historian hopes Harper's visit to Ukraine museum will help shed light on war atrocities

Historians who say Prime Minister Stephen Harper got a
one-sided perspective on Second World War atrocities when he visited a
museum in Ukraine last month jumped the gun, according to the museum's
former director.

Volodymyr Viatrovych, a historian popular with Ukrainian
nationalists in both his own country and in Canada, was ousted from his
job after Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine's pro-Moscow president, took
office earlier this year.

He was responding, at the request of the Ukrainian Canadian
Congress, to historians' complaints that Harper was only shown exhibits
focusing on atrocities committed in June, 1941 by Soviet secret police
against Ukrainians, Poles and Jews.

They complained that the museum, once a prison where more than
1,000 political prisoners were murdered, doesn't mention the
anti-Jewish pogrom that immediately followed in Lviv after the Nazis
routed Soviet forces.

"It's premature at this time, to assess this museum because it
is a work in progress," he said, through a translator, to Postmedia
News.

"The plans are to work at developing a full picture of all the
tragedies that took place in this prison, including tragedies against
Jews."

He said he hoped Harper's visit will put pressure on the
Yanukovych regime to allow the museum to execute those plans.

A number of historians, most recently Yale University Prof.
Timothy Snyder, have asserted that Ukrainians linked to the
Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists took part in anti-Jewish pogroms
and later helped the Nazis round up and kill Jewish civilians during
the 1941-43 period.

After the Nazi defeat at Stalingrad, the Ukrainian police
officers who assisted the Nazis in rounding up and killing Ukrainian
Jews "helped form a partisan army in 1943, which under the leadership
of Ukrainian nationalists cleansed the former southwest Poland -- which
it saw as Western Ukraine -- of remaining Poles," Snyder wrote in
Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin.

The partisan army "murdered tens of thousands of Poles and
provoked reprisals from Poles upon Ukrainian citizens," he wrote.

Viatrovych said anti-Jewish pogroms, such as the one right
after the Soviets fled and in which numerous Lviv Jews were rounded up,
beaten, humiliated and sometimes killed, are the subject of "much
academic controversy" due to the level of Ukrainian involvement.

"Individual members of the population did take (part) in the
German-initiated repressions," said the historian, who had access at
the museum to documents by the Soviet-controlled Ukrainian security
services.

"The participants in the repressions from the general
population included criminal elements who wanted to benefit materially
by participating in the repressions. Some took part relying on German
propaganda, which was put forward at that time that Jews were
responsible for, as the Germans called it, Jewish Bolshevism."

But "no Ukrainian political movement advocated the
participation in these repressions or anti-Jewish pogroms," he said.

"The fact that some members of the police force organized by
the Germans ultimately ended up in various military formations, such as
the . . . Ukrainian Insurgent Army (the military wing of the
Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) does not establish proof that
these particular formations were involved in perpetrating the
Holocaust."

He acknowledged that the Ukrainian Insurgent Army did commit
war crimes against Poles, but said it was in the context of a 1942-47
"war" between Polish and Ukrainian "underground movements" in the
disputed territory.

"There was also citizen participation in this war by people
who were not involved formally in any military formation. As a result a
great number of people died, both Poles and Ukrainians, who resided in
Polish villages and Ukrainian villages," he said. "It could be argued
that in this Polish-Ukrainian war, both sides committed acts which
could possibly be termed as war crimes," he said.

"But you have to remember that during the Second World War,
there is no army which is not accused of war crimes."

Viatrovych, who spoke last week at a gathering of Ukrainian
Canadian Congress members in Alberta, said he is confident newly
released material will prove that the Soviet Union's KGB secret police
concocted evidence to suggest members of the Organization of Ukrainian
Nationalists were complicit in the Holocaust.